Authorial Aspiration Quotes

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

I started writing while I was a little boy. Maybe it's because I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday. Also, my love for good writing pushed me.

- I don't want to be a writer so I can write about my life. I want to be a writer to escape from it. + Then you shouldn't be a writer.

You know you're ready to write a book when you have a feeling that you should do it, no matter what anybody says. It's like falling in love or starting a company. When you're still wondering if you should get married or you're still wondering whether you should start a company that might be not the right person or the right idea. And writing is the same way. When you've locked on to the topic, you'll just write it.

That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'

When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.

When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.

I would have to say the novel 'War and Peace' influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated to me the enormous power of literature and fired me up with a desire to become a writer, to participate in what I considered then to be the greatest of all endeavors.

Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'

At a tender age, I commandeered half a quire of foolscap from my father's desk and sat down to write a book. ...I had observed onprinted fly leaves the words "By the author of, etc." ...So under the title of my prospective work I wrote: By the author of "Les Miserables," "The Woman in White," "Dombey and Son," "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and "Our Life in the Highlands," the last-named being an opus of good Queen Victoria. I had not read all these works but they existed on our bookshelves, and I hoped to produce something worthy of comparison.

I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.

When I read a book I liked, I would get a pen and one of my father's legal pads and rewrite it from memory as if I had thought of it myself. It was a clear sign that I wanted to be involved in writing, even if it was just pretend at that point.

I originally wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald, but failed.

I was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published.

I never set out to be a published writer.

There are stylists I really love. I'm a huge Joan Didion fan - if I wrote something that she might like, then I'd feel very proud. I want the action to move as quickly as it does in A Book of Common Prayer, where one thing bonks right into another very quickly.

I couldn't even pick up the newspaper without saying, 'This is a fine piece of writing. I wish to hell I could write like this.'

...in other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama Interview - March 1964

I never wanted to be "a writer"; I only ever aspired to be an science fiction writer. They'll tear that badge out of my cold dead hands.